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Friday, 28 November 2014

The question first arose many years ago when my
colleagues and I started to design the qualitative component of a study on
access to land.We thought we should use
the opportunity provided by that study to develop our own protocols and
training manuals for conducting qualitative research.We read a lot of material that was available
then on research methodology, and got busy with serious debates while trying to
complete various research tasks.What
were the relative merits, functions and complementarities of qualitative and
quantitative approaches (another blog)? How does a social policy focus allow
qualitative research to escape the more narcissistic indulgences of
contemporary anthropology (another blog)?Why was it important to insist on the distinctiveness of qualitative
social science research from similar-feeling field approaches such as
participatory appraisals and action research (another blog)? How the term
‘data’ needed to be constantly rescued from the monopoly of statisticians
(another blog)? Why was rigorous qualitative research anything but woolly, and
usually much harder work than numbers (definitely another blog)?

Thursday, 13 November 2014

In the last week of October, an event was
hosted by a multilateral organization in collaboration with a local think tank
to discuss ‘The Political Economy of the Budget.’ The invite was a pleasant
surprise for two reasons.First, it is
unusual in Pakistan to come across a seminar with the ‘political economy’
prefix as part of it. Budgets are especially amenable to political economy
analysis given the explicitly political nature of resource allocations and
revenue collection. Second, seminars and discussions on the budget generally
begin in the second quarter of the year. Debating budget related issues so
early in the fiscal year is also a welcome initiative.

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About this blog

The Collective blog is written by researchers and guests of the Collective for Social Science Research. The authors share insight on their multidisciplinary research covering areas of social policy, economics, poverty, gender studies, nutrition, agriculture, labour, migration, and conflict with the objective of fostering informed debate on social, political and economic issues and policies.

The posts on this blog reflect the opinions of each individual, and not necessarily those of the Collective for Social Science Research.